The world of dreams...

Recently I have been remembering a lot of my dreams, and most of them have been very emotion-filled.  As I wake up with the intensity of the dream still with me, it can follow me through much of my day.  Since this has been happening, I have been thinking about how I dream and how I have dreamed in the past.  I've been interested in dreams since middle school, and I figured I'd share some of my history of dreams.

One of the first dreams that I remember specifically was from when I was around eight years old, I think.  It was a recurring bad dream that I had where I was a dog, and I needed to escape along with another animal companion that I had.  I was in a dark area that was fenced in.  There were plants everywhere, and it felt like an impossible maze.  The presence of someone/something evil was clear in my mind, although I don't know what/who it was.  I just wanted out of there!

In middle school and high school, my bad dreams turned into those where my vision was dark and/or blurry, and I couldn't get to where I needed to go because I couldn't see!  I also started having dreams about having loose teeth or losing teeth.

As I progressed through college and grad school, my bad dream of choice involved (and still involves) a tsunami.  The way the tsunami occurs changes each time, but I'm always there, and I always see the formidable force of destruction coming onto the land.  I also occasionally have dreams about people I care about, Matthew in particular, dying.  Those are the ones where I wake up panicked, and I have to reach over to see if Matthew is still there and alive.

I have also had a recurring dream the last few years that involve the young men I have cared about in the past.  I had a couple of guys leave me heartbroken during high school, and in my dreams, one of these guys will realize that he actually still loves me and he regrets leaving me.  I always realize that I'm married to Matthew in these dreams, so I always feel a mixture of elation (because I suddenly feel valuable), romantic joy (like at the beginning of each dating relationship I've had), and guilt (because I'm genuinely emotionally torn between past love and my marriage with Matthew.)  The dreams vary, but what I think it interesting is that the guy always wants to kiss, but I never let him because I don't want to hurt Matthew or our marriage.  These dreams about my past relationships always leave me addled as I wake up.  The emotion doesn't fade when I regain consciousness, and I feel like I'm in high school again and on an emotional roller coaster.  The "future that would have been" is strangely imprinted in my mind, and it's challenging to sort out reality and fantasy.

I think I tend to dream more intensely when I am under stress.  It is no surprise that during college I had many a bad dream.  Recently, although I usually have no particular stressful events occurring, I find that just the complete uncertainty of my future is messing with my mind.  I don't know if it's my personality or what, but I really struggle with being unable to see more than a blank slate a week or two into my future.  While I understand that I can never see what my future will hold, I think that it is fairly human to construct a reasonable prediction of the future based on the current status.  It is unnerving to not be able to do this.

I find it interesting that two of the most stressful events of my life (having a couple of my relationships severed) come to me in my dreams where my mind fixes them by having people decide that they love me.  In real life, I've never felt settled by the ends of these two relationships.  I've never quite understood what exactly ended them, and since I was not the one who ended them, I was left feeling very weak, ugly, and worthless as a woman.  It took awhile to get over these insecurities, and I suppose that I'm probably still not through with them.  I guess it's no surprise that my mind tries to mend me as I sleep.

At any rate, I'm fairly fascinated by what my mind does when I have no control over my thoughts.  Do you have any interesting dream stories?

*Added 8/1/2011*  My brain apparently wanted to remind me of another common dream that I have when I'm stressed, because I had it last night!  A common stressful dream that I have is one where I have a bunch of stuff strewn around and mixed in with other peoples' things, and I am trying to collect my things.  It ends up being an unending process where I have lost specific things, or my pile repeatedly get strewn out again, or I just have a seemingly endless amount of stuff to collect.  Last night, in addition to the usual chaos of collecting things, my dream also involved me collecting balls of yarn that had rolled around, so I had to find untangle the yarn strands from the mess around them.  Yeah, yeah, brain.  I hear you!  I've been knitting and crocheting too much!